by Daniel Kalla
Franz tried not to read too much into the intimacy of his wife’s tone. “Besides, how would we get Charlie to Frenchtown?” he asked. “He’s in no shape to travel.”
“This is true,” Wen-Cheng said.
Franz massaged his temples. “It would be best to take Charlie somewhere nearby.”
Sunny nodded. “In the ghetto. Somewhere any of us could tend to him.”
“What more can any of us do for him now?” Wen-Cheng asked.
Franz saw the doctor’s point, but his pessimistic tone still irked him. “The kind of care—dressing changes, painkillers and so on—that we would offer any post-operative patient,” he said pointedly.
“Franz? Sunny?” Ernst’s frantic voice penetrated the bedroom door. “Is it over?”
Wen-Cheng motioned toward the door. “Go talk to him. I will stay and watch Charlie.”
Franz followed Sunny into the apartment’s main room, closing the bedroom door firmly behind him.
Esther sat holding Jakob to her chest under a blanket. Ernst stood near the door with an arm draped protectively over Hannah’s shoulder. He had found another cigarette and he waved it at them with his free hand. “Well?”
“Hannah-chen!” Franz cried. “What are you doing home?”
“They cancelled school today, Papa.”
“Yes, lucky for me they did.” Ernst pulled Hannah tighter against him. “Now, please. How is Charlie?”
Sunny gave Hannah a little grin before turning to Ernst. “There were no surprises,” she said, electing not to mention the ineffective anaesthetic.
“Can I see him?” Ernst asked.
“Give him a few minutes,” Sunny said. “He has not fully woken up.”
“Papa, Mr. Ghoya came to our school,” Hannah said. “He brought Nazis with him. They went through the classrooms. They even spoke to the principal and some of the teachers.”
Ernst made a face. “What could those cretins possibly want with your school?”
Franz didn’t want to alarm Hannah any further with the news that the same men had trooped through the hospital as though they owned it. “You know the Nazis, Liebchen. They have to know what we are up to at all times.”
Hannah’s face quivered. “Why can’t they just leave us be?”
As she clung to Ernst’s side, Franz saw Hannah’s teenage defiance melt away. She was still just his child. “Doesn’t matter what they are up to, Hannah.” Franz forced a smile for her. “Colonel Kubota is now ultimately responsible for the refugees. And he will not let them harm us.”
“Do you really think so, Papa?”
“Absolutely.” He hoped he sounded more certain than he felt.
“So what happens now?” Esther asked from her chair.
Sunny looked blankly to Franz. Before he could answer, they heard a sharp knock at the apartment door.
Silence swallowed the room. No one moved. The knocks only grew louder.
Sunny started for the door, but Franz shot out a hand to hold her back. He considered trying to hide the women and children but realized that it would be pointless. There was nowhere to conceal them.
Go away! Leave us be! Franz thought as he moved toward the door, his heart in his throat. His hand trembled as he slowly pulled the door open. Recognizing Joey and Yang at the threshold, Franz almost laughed in relief.
Joey burst into the room, anxious for details. Yang entered warily, reminding Franz of a stray cat that sensed danger but was too hungry to pass up the prospect of milk. The tiny woman looked even more frail than the last time Franz had seen her. Most of the locals were justifiably frightened of the Japanese, but Yang’s terror ran deeper. Soldiers had gunned down her little brother and sister-in-law in the first days of the invasion. Her brother, whom Yang had practically raised, had still been alive when she found him on the sidewalk, clutching at his wife’s cold wrist and whimpering for help that was never to come.
Sunny rushed over to Yang and enfolded her in a hug. They chatted in Chinese for a moment, then Yang glanced over Sunny’s shoulder at Franz and muttered in Shanghainese.
“What did she say, Sunny?” he asked.
Still embracing Yang, Sunny turned to Franz with a smile. “She will take Charlie in, too.”
“Into her home?” Franz asked. “Here in the ghetto?”
“Yes,” Sunny said.
Franz pointed to the bedroom door. “Yang, do you understand who that man is in there?”
She nodded without meeting his eyes.
“And you are still willing to take him in?”
“I am.” They were the first English words Franz had ever heard Yang speak.
III
Chapter 21
September 23, 1943
Sunny could see Yang’s entire apartment from the doorway. She couldn’t imagine how Charlie, Simon and Yang had shared these cramped quarters for the past four months, especially considering that neither man could leave the apartment’s confines without risking all of their lives.
Still, Sunny had not seen her old amah so energized since before her father’s murder, almost five years earlier. Yang had flourished in her new role as protector of the two fugitives. She guarded them with the same fierce care with which she had once swaddled Sunny. Simon had commented that Yang was like a mother, a cop and a grade-school teacher all rolled up into one tiny terrifying package.
The smell of rice and fish wafted over to Sunny. Yang glanced over from the single burner where she tended to a small pot. “No one saw you enter, Soon Yi?” she demanded.
This was typical. Yang had never been particularly trusting, but of late she was suspicious of everyone, and for good reason. The Kempeitai had ramped up their raids and roundups of locals, often responding to allegations that were imagined or exaggerated. Neighbours were directing suspicion to one another to deflect it from themselves, and Shanghai was infested with informants, some motivated by better rice rations for their hungry families, others driven by opportunism or even spite. Sunny had heard of a woman who, after having felt slighted at a family gathering, had falsely charged her younger brothers with spying. If the rumour were to be believed, all four had been executed. Becoming an informant was as easy as finding an English-speaking Japanese soldier. Sunny knew the risk of exposure was greater than ever.
“I was careful, Yang.” Sunny smiled. “No one saw me.”
Simon hurried over and crushed her in a hug. His face was still gaunt, but somehow Yang had not allowed either him or Charlie to lose any more weight under her watch. “Essie? Where is she?” were the first words out of Simon’s mouth.
“Jakob is napping,” Sunny said. “They will visit as soon as he wakes.”
Yang had stipulated that Simon’s wife and son could visit only on Thursday afternoons, when her elderly neighbours headed out to a friend’s home for their weekly game of mah-jong. She worried that the sounds of the mother and baby would seep through the flimsy walls and draw the attention of the old couple, despite their being relatively deaf. Simon and Esther had accepted her condition, since the situation was still preferable to the open-ended separation they had endured during his time at the Comfort Home.
Sunny held up the two English-language books that she had managed to find in the past week. She knew the men would lap up the dog-eared works, especially Charlie, who loved the hard-boiled style of American crime novels.
Simon eagerly accepted the books and studied their covers. “Dashiell Hammett, Charlie!” he called over his shoulder. “We hit the mother lode this week.”
Charlie made his way toward her on the old wooden crutches he had borrowed from the hospital, his pant leg pinned up to his thigh. His agility had improved remarkably. Now he was almost graceful. “I hope Sam Spade returns in this one,” he said.
Charlie had accepted the loss of his leg without a word of complaint or self-pity. Still, for him, a
s for everyone else living in the ghetto, the last four months had been anything but easy. A week after the amputation surgery, he developed a pulmonary embolus from a blood clot that had formed in the veins in his other leg and eventually lodged in his lungs. No one expected him to survive. One evening, as Jia-Li and Sunny sat at his bedside listening to him struggle for breath, out of nowhere the previously taciturn general had suddenly announced, “My father killed her.”
“Killed who?” Jia-Li asked.
“My mother,” he whispered.
Sunny wondered if Charlie had slipped back into a delirium. “Your parents aren’t here, Charlie,” she said softly.
“No, no,” he said. “In Harbin. My home in Manchuria. I was only six.”
Jia-Li leaned closer. “Your father murdered her?”
“He beat Mother all the time. She would tell my sister and me that she was clumsy and fell.” He paused to try to catch his breath. “But we used to hear the shouts and the beatings from our bed. My sister, Dao-Ming, she is older than me, but I still remember her crying into my shoulder.”
“How wretched,” Jia-Li murmured.
“One day we woke up and Mother was gone. ‘Died in a fall,’ Father told us. But we knew better,” Charlie grunted. “The next day he left us at the orphanage run by the Methodists.”
“Ah,” Sunny said. “Is that where you learned to speak English so well?”
Charlie nodded. “They were kind, those missionaries. Every night, the old English reverend, Dr. Woodard, used to read to us. Milton, Shakespeare and always from his old leather-covered Bible.” He chuckled weakly. “Dr. Woodard told us we had to learn to speak properly, since God only understood the King’s English.”
Jia-Li smiled. “Sounds like a better home than your father’s.”
Charlie stared off into space. He gulped for air, never seeming to swallow enough. “Once I was thirteen, I left the orphanage to track him down. It was how I learned to fight. How I ended up in the army. Even after the Japanese invaded . . . I only wanted to find him . . . to restore Mother’s honour.” He shut his eyes. “I will never get that opportunity now.”
Jia-Li pressed her forehead to his. “Stay with us, Charlie. Please. Do not waste any more time hunting the ghost of your father.”
Within hours, Charlie had slipped into a coma that Sunny assumed would prove fatal, but later that day he somehow fought back to consciousness. Within another week, he was breathing more easily, though he had never regained his previous lung capacity. A few turns around the flat could wind him now.
Charlie had never since mentioned his childhood or his desire for revenge on his father. Lately, he had begun to focus his energy on returning to the countryside. Now, he leaned on one crutch and scraped the floor with the other. “The time has come for me to return to my men,” he declared quietly.
Yang glanced over her shoulder at him from the stove but said nothing.
“And how do you plan to get there?” Sunny asked.
“Perhaps with the assistance of Jia-Li’s . . . employers.”
Sunny knew that Jia-Li would do anything for Charlie but also that it would break her friend’s heart to see him go. She had never admitted to her feelings, but she was transformed in Charlie’s presence. Jia-Li never flirted with him, which was unusual in itself, but it was her awkward self-consciousness around Charlie that told Sunny how hard her friend had fallen. She had even broken off her relationship with the Russian poet.
“No offence, Charlie,” Simon said. “But how much help can you be in the field on one leg and half a working lung?”
Charlie shrugged. “Only time will tell, my friend.”
Simon rolled his eyes. “No, I am pretty sure the first pothole you overlook will tell.”
Charlie only laughed. “Until then, I might be of some use.”
“Listen, pal, there are people fighting this war from the inside, too.”
Charlie nodded. “The Underground? Here in Shanghai?”
“Underground . . . Resistance . . . whatever they call themselves,” Simon said. “We’ve all heard the stories of the ships they’ve sunk and convoys they’ve sabotaged. Not to mention the assassinations. Word is they’ve got the Japs checking over their shoulders these days.”
“I am a soldier, not a spy,” Charlie said. “Besides, can you imagine anyone more conspicuous than me?”
Sunny had to agree. She suddenly felt irrationally conspicuous herself. She hated having to conceal her connection to the Underground from her loved ones, but she knew how vehemently they would object, especially Franz.
“I belong with my men,” Charlie continued. “Not lying around here, nothing more than a burden and a liability.”
“Enough foolishness!” Yang piped up in Chinese, having followed the conversation despite their speaking in English.
“Yang is right,” Sunny said. “You are both wanted men. And, Charlie, you are in no shape to go anywhere. The only place for both of you is right here.”
The doorknob rattled, and everyone’s eyes turned toward it. Yang inched back from the stove as though edging away from a rearing cobra.
Sunny didn’t share her amah’s alarm. She knew that the Japanese didn’t arrive so quietly. The door opened a sliver and Ernst slid through. Carrying a sack of rice under his arm, he flashed Yang a grin. But she turned back to her pot with a scowl, muttering a stream of Chinese curses at him for this unannounced visit.
“I really think that one is warming to me.” Ernst motioned to Yang with his lit cigarette. “I do hope she will not be too devastated to learn that my romantic tendencies lie elsewhere.”
Simon laughed. “I think you’re pretty safe on that front.”
Ernst deposited the rice at Yang’s feet. She grunted her gratitude in Chinese without looking up.
Ernst was the only person Sunny knew who had gained weight in the past four months. His cheeks had fleshed out and were covered by a full beard. During his time back in Shanghai, he had grown increasingly confident in the anonymity his long hair and scruffy beard afforded him. His attitude verged on cavalier. “Admit it, Sunny,” he had recently remarked. “We white devils all look exactly the same to you. Imagine the Japanese trying to recognize me behind this glorious mane.”
Ernst had rented an apartment outside the ghetto, in Germantown—a predominantly European-populated neighbourhood within the International Settlement. Adopting the alias Gustav Klimper—a play on the famous Austrian artist Gustav Klimt—he had begun to paint again. Rather than continuing with the raw portraits that had made such a splash on the art scenes of Vienna and Shanghai before the war, he had taken to painting mountainous landscapes featuring fields of wild edelweiss and cityscapes filled with classical architecture. Or, as he described it, “The kind of trite bunk that the Nazis simply cannot get their fill of.”
Ernst greeted Sunny with a kiss to either cheek. “Can you believe it?” he said with an amused grin. “They are insisting that I attend one of their meetings.”
“Who is ‘they’?” she asked.
“My neighbours,” Ernst said. “The couple who have bought not one but two of my renderings of the Brandenburg Gate. They tell me that Baron von Puttkamer—that megalomaniac from the wireless—will be speaking.”
Sunny cringed at the mention of von Puttkamer’s name. A month earlier, she had inadvertently tuned in to one of his speeches on Jia-Li’s radio. Von Puttkamer spoke softly and with more restraint than many of the other Nazis, but he expressed a similar hateful philosophy, cloaked as always in the grand rhetoric of German nationalism. She understood how he had earned the moniker “Goebbels of Asia.”
Simon frowned. “Come on, Ernst, you don’t actually plan to go see von Puttkamer in person?”
“A free comedy? Why not?” Ernst looked from Simon to Sunny and the flippancy drained from his expression. “Besides, the Germans here, th
ey mention the Jewish refugees often—too often.”
Simon shook his head. “I guess they don’t have enough worries, what with the Italians surrendering and the Ruskies advancing westward every day?”
Ernst ran a hand through his thick hair. “The Nazis are nothing if not singularly German in their fixation with Jews.”
Sunny remembered that late spring day when she and Franz had run into the Nazi contingent touring the ghetto. Von Puttkamer had been seen in the ghetto on two occasions since. Franz had told her that his visits were just meant to intimidate the refugees, but Sunny could see in her husband’s eyes that he too worried that the Nazis might have something more sinister in mind.
“What do you expect to find out from the baron?” Simon grunted. “You think Hitler has had a change of heart? Maybe he wants to rebuild all those synagogues he levelled on Kristallnacht?”
Ernst frowned, as though he were seriously considering Simon’s suggestion. “Seems rather unlikely. Still, my neighbours are under the impression that I belong to the Party. After all, I have earned a reputation as a painter whose works glorify the Reich. You never know. Perhaps they might allow me into their inner circle.”
“To spy on them?” Simon squinted at him. “Is that what you’ve got in mind?”
Ernst shrugged. “They trust me so far.”
“And if someone recognizes you as Ernst Muhler?” Sunny asked.
“Ach, not to worry,” Ernst said confidently. “Those fools think they have wiped out the entire avant-garde. Besides, they don’t believe in fairies any longer.”
* * *
Sunny left Yang’s flat with a growing sense of unease, and not only because of the inherent risk of Ernst’s plan. Her worry deepened as she headed toward the Public Garden. Wen-Cheng had requested another meeting with her there.
Wen-Cheng had thus far been Sunny’s only connection to the Underground. He had only ever approached her with an assignment once, three months earlier: a simple task that she had completed by the end of July. Wen-Cheng had asked her to track the movements of a certain Kempeitai officer, Captain Kanamoto. The captain had lost most of his foot to a landmine in Burma. Whether out of convenience or because of his lack of faith in the Shanghai General, Kanamoto had taken to visiting the refugee hospital to have the bandages changed on what was left of his foot. The chronic wound required frequent cleaning, and though any nurse could have tended to it, Kanamoto had started insisting that Sunny perform the procedure.
